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This Thanksgiving weekend, we are simply grateful to be here in The City Beautiful. What good fortune. We know so many folks who feel the same way. Here at the Storm Lake Times Pilot, we deeply appreciate your support through the years. It is our pleasure, which we certainly do not take for granted, to report and reflect on this wonderful Iowa community.
We are slightly in the black as we approach the end of the year. We rejoice. Paid readership has grown steadily over the past three years. Many newspapers have given up the ghost in towns bigger than ours. The challenges are immense — time and attention span, English literacy, the alluring cacophony of the Internet masquerading as enlightenment.
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Thank you.
Storm Lake’s financial consultant, Tim Oswald of Des Moines, advised a city task force to increase water rates to start stashing away cash for what could be a $200 million expansion of the water plant. Double-digit increases for the foreseeable future have a way of taking your breath away. Keep increasing property taxes and fees like this and we won’t be able to afford the place.
This is a working-class town that cannot afford these kinds of rate increases.
We would not need such an expansion if we were not exhausting the supply. We need more and deeper wells because of the thirst of agribusiness. The employees are being saddled with much higher rates while meatpacking gets volume discounts. In effect, we are subsidizing hog production and meatpacking through our water rates.
The city should revisit the rates it charges industrial consumers in relation to residences. Increased consumption is rewarded by a lower rate when the opposite should true.
We should be especially careful about over-building a water system predicated on Tyson’s presence. It recently shut down a pork plant in Perry and just announced it will close a beef plant in Lexington, Neb. Storm Lake is not uniquely insulated from a plant closure no matter how cheap the water is. We could get stuck with a huge water infrastructure if Tyson ever pulls out. Lexington didn’t see it coming. We could get blindsided, too.
The city must protect local residents from exorbitant water and sewer rate increases. That means coming to a different understanding about how we structure water rates. We are getting almost no help from state or federal authorities who have a vital interest in maintaining a secure food processing system. At some point we become slaves to that system, when the worker bees are charged with shouldering the burden for most of the system. The city is assuming that we can afford it. We cannot. We need an equitable solution that gets the burden off the back of modest working households.
Rep. Randy Feenstra pledged last week to dramatically cut property taxes as he campaigns for the Republican gubernatorial nomination. The congressman from Hull told a crowd in Des Moines that he intends to make Iowa “the most business- and ag-friendly state in the country.” You can’t be friendly when property taxes jump like they are.
“We’ve got to be the business state, we got to sell it,” Feenstra said. “We have to dramatically lower our property taxes, we’ve got to continue to reduce regulation. We got to cut property taxes, lower and freeze them.”
He didn’t say how. He does not have to. He serves in the dysfunctional Congress, not the craven Iowa Legislature. Gov. Kim Reynolds in her swan song promises to cut local government services to get property taxes down. She notes that schools necessarily will be the primary target, since that is where most of the money goes.
Feenstra says there is a new way to do things. He did not reveal what the new way is.
This is how things get out of control, when we elect people on this premise. Feenstra is not being honest. There is no new way of paying for police and fire services. The Republicans in control of the legislature messed with the property tax system a few years ago which helped contribute to higher bills for certain classes. Feenstra should bone up on that. When you are so business- and ag-friendly the average residential homeowner gets hammered. (See editorial above.)
The Trump Administration called off the dogs against farm workers. It is opening up visas to foreign-born workers because even the president himself recognizes that we need the help. Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, said during a visit to Storm Lake awhile back that this community had no reason for alarm. There have been no raids of the big meatpackers. ICE prefers putting on a show in big cities with Democratic mayors. Federal agents are terrorizing Charlotte, but not North Carolina’s pork sector.
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said that deportations will be “strategic, so as not to compromise our food supply.”
Rollins also has promised a “100-percent American workforce.” Donald Trump campaigned to deport all undocumented immigrants from the USA. Tyson reports that it does not employ undocumented workers. They’re good with each other. The rest of us don’t know what could happen, which is the way those in charge like it.
Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird is in a virtual tie with little-known Democratic challenger Nate Willems, according to a conservative outside funding group that invested $600,000 in TV ads last month on Bird’s behalf. According to the website Bleeding Heartland, an outfit called the Fund for Economic Independence purportedly has polling to show that Bird trailed Willems by seven percentage points in September. The fund said that after its ads aired across Iowa Bird pulled even in a subsequent survey.
Bird has worked hard alienating voters. She sued a Republican sheriff in Winnieshiek County over immigration (even though there are hardly any immigrants in Decorah). Her latest is leading a lawsuit against California climate-reporting rules. She is a provocateur. It’s backfiring.
It has to hurt when you’re forced to dump money into a campaign defending an incumbent attorney general. That’s $600,000 that cannot be spent defending the open Second District Congressional seat. This won’t the end of it. Bird will need a lot more to pursue the national right-wing agenda in which Iowans are quickly losing interest.
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